The present invention relates to a storage controller and its data management method, and, for instance, can be suitably applied to a storage system that replicates a volume of a storage controller storing data transmitted from a host system in another storage controller.
Conventionally, known is technology for managing the backup of a volume of a storage controller (hereinafter referred to as a “primary storage controller”) storing data transmitted from a host system operated in a certain site for disaster recovery of the storage system in a volume of a storage controller (hereinafter referred to as a “secondary storage controller”) established at a remote site (this technology is hereinafter referred to as “remote copying”), and various other related technologies have been proposed.
For example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. H11 (1999)-259348, the primary storage controller has at least one volume and transmits a request for acquiring at least a part of the snapshot of such volume to a secondary storage controller, and the secondary storage controller replies to the request for acquiring the snapshot and has a volume which is a replicated copy of the volume of the primary storage controller, and the volume of the primary storage controller is replicated in the volume of the secondary storage controller by acquiring the snapshot of the corresponding portion.
Further, for instance, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-267569, the storage controller controls the reading and writing of data from and in a first volume, controls the data newly stored in the volume to be written in a second volume as differential data per generation, and manages differential data by providing, in an area of a memory, a snapshot management table managing the relationship of differential data per generation stored in the second volume. And, the storage controller generates a virtual volume of a specific generation with the snapshot management table, and thereby performs remote copying with this virtual volume.
Moreover, for example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-275494, the secondary storage controller receives difference-related information from the primary storage controller, generates generation management information based on the received difference-related information, and restores the stored contents of the designated generation based on the generated generation management information and the volume of the secondary storage controller.
In a database system handling vast scales of data such as a data center, data is managed using a storage system configured separately from a host system. For example, a disc array system is well-known as this kind of storage system. In a disc array system, a large number of disc drives arranged in an array are managed as a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Inexpensive Disks). At least one physical unit is then formed on the physical storage region provided by the large number of disc drives and this logical unit is provided to the host system. The host system then recognizes the logical unit as a single physical device and accesses data on the logical unit.
This type of storage system is taken as a measure for reliably preserving data should accidents etc. occur. For example, a system with a high fault tolerance is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2005-293469 where data written to a primary storage control device is remote copied to a secondary storage control device so that the data is duplicated.